Boxer, Beetle

by Ned Beauman

  ‘Same to you.’

  ‘I notice you brought your “valet” or whatever he is.’

  ‘Yes. Are you composing?’ Erskine knew that his sister had only seized upon ‘atonal music’ (whatever that meant) as a way of disconcerting their parents, and he also knew that it wouldn’t work – even their father wouldn’t be dense enough to believe that she really liked all that rot, most of which sounded like something a sadistic dentist would pipe into his waiting room to frighten his patients. Alistair Thurlow, who supposedly knew all about these things, had claimed that Evelyn’s compositions displayed ‘so much potential it’s rather staggering’, and had tried to persuade Erskine’s parents to send her to an academy of some kind, but Erskine felt sure he was just being polite.

  ‘No. Practising. I can’t get anything done when I’m cooped up in this house.’

  ‘Go for a walk, then.’

  ‘That’s no use at all,’ said Evelyn obscurely.

  Before Erskine could ask her what she meant, a red-haired girl of about twelve years old burst into the room and shouted, ‘Mr Erskine, I have just seen your friend Mr Morton brutally sodomising your dear mother!’ Erskine was taken aback for a moment before he realised that the girl was Millicent Bruiseland and this was quite normal. Millicent’s mother, apparently as a devious mode of retribution in some feud with her husband, had sent their insufferably precocious daughter to a Finnish psychiatrist who had packed her head with words she still only dimly understood, and the girl was now in the habit of making accusations like this one. Her parents were confident that she would soon grow out of it as long as nobody paid her any attention.

  Evelyn said, ‘Go away and write your novel, Milly.’ Millicent tutted and went out. ‘I really don’t understand why anyone is interested in children,’ she added.

  ‘No.’ Then Erskine looked up. ‘Wait a minute, is Morton actually here? Was that much true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My God, of all the blasted people,’ said Erskine. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, Mosley’s not coming – not that anyone but Father ever really thought he would – and Bruiseland insisted that there be some representation from the Blackshirts.’

  ‘Then why Morton? He’s not much of a “representation”. As far as I know he’s only vaguely associated with that gang.’

  ‘It also happens that Julius and I have become engaged,’ said Evelyn, not meeting his eyes but staring past him at the atrocious green wallpaper.

  ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last week.’

  ‘Evelyn, for heaven’s sake, you don’t even know the man.’

  ‘Yes, I do. And we’re both from good healthy stock. Isn’t that all you care about?’

  ‘I do have some concern for your wellbeing, sister.’

  Then their mother came in clutching a flower pot.

  ‘Angels, go upstairs and pay a visit to Casper Bruiseland. He’s up in the observatory and I’m sure he’d be pleased to see you both.’

  Philip and Evelyn began a shrill duet of protest. Their mother was too busy to argue so she said, ‘All right, all right, Casper can wait. But your father can’t, Philip.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the library. Off you go.’

  Erskine did as he was told. The door to the library was closed. As he reached for the handle he heard voices inside, and paused. One voice was his father’s and the other was Leonard Bruiseland’s. He pressed his ear to the wood. He had always loved eavesdropping.

  ‘How many letters have you got from this thug?’ said Erskine’s father.

  ‘Just one,’ said Bruiseland.

  ‘Did you recognise the handwriting?’

  ‘No. Did you?’

  ‘No. I think it was deliberately disguised.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘And it contained the same threats?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bruiseland. ‘It’s very alarming.’

  ‘It’s not alarming. Any fool can write a nasty letter.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Erskine heard muffled footsteps and backed away from the door of the library just before it was flung open.

  ‘Aha, the Erskine boy!’ said Bruiseland. He was a cheerful muscular man with a peeling red nose who would often, mid-sentence, perform a totally unselfconscious symphony of snorting, barking and choking sounds to dislodge some particle from his sinuses. ‘How is our young scientist?’ Bruiseland, devoted to his three farms, disliked most scientists, but he liked Erskine because Erskine studied what Bruiseland understood to be a sort of advanced branch of animal husbandry.

  ‘Very well, thank you.’

  ‘You’re mostly in London nowadays?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ll snargh snargh hargh snargh soon grow out of that, I’m sure. And, er, how is your sister?’ said Bruiseland, his broad smile shifting to a look of apprehension.

  ‘She’s recently engaged,’ said Erskine, discreetly wiping spittle from his forehead.

  ‘Oh.’ To Bruiseland, Evelyn Erskine was an object of profound terror. Since most of his stereotypes were at least fifteen years out of date, he placed her somewhere between the opium-smoking flapper and the Ibsen woman who instead of children has ‘soul-conflict’. He felt sure that her unlucky future husband would discover on her naked body the wounds of at least three (apparently contradictory) sexual tendencies, each on its own enough to prevent her from ever giving him a healthy heir: the bruised pustulent genitals of a dizzy aristocratic whore; the sinister buttock tattoos of a lesbian cultist; and the pancake breasts of a neurotic Modernist androgyne. Her sarcasm, her impetuousness, her music, her (presumed) sexual degeneracy and half a dozen other terrible qualities made her, to Bruiseland, not only a summary of everything that was wrong with post-suffrage women, but also a culprit in the decay of his own marriage. He didn’t believed that his wife would ever have thought of sending their daughter to that Finnish amoralist, for instance, without a bit of a push from Evelyn Erskine and her comrades, nor would she have thought of running off to Florence to spend all his money. Still, he acknowledged that ultimately the nobility of England had no one but themselves to blame for the condition of their wives and daughters – no one but themselves, foreigners, and the free press.

  Erskine finished his conversation with Bruiseland and went into the library. His most unpleasant interviews with his father had always taken place there, and even after three years at Cambridge he still couldn’t help feeling that the smell of old books had a certain malevolence.

  His father nodded in greeting and said, ‘What’s that you’re carrying?’

  ‘My monograph on Pangaean.’ Erskine had not got used to his father’s hair being so grey. Other than that they looked quite alike.

  ‘I hoped it might be. Out with it, then.’

  Erskine’s father sat in the armchair beside the brass brain while Erskine stood and read from his handwritten pages. When Erskine had finished, his father said, ‘That’s not absolutely inadequate. May as well have it typed up and bound.’ Erskine smiled with pride. ‘Now, what’s this your mother says about your bringing a bloody valet with you?’

  Erskine stuttered something.

  ‘First of all, I don’t hand over all that money every month so that you can pay someone to iron your newspapers. And, second, to bring your midget valet from London up to visit your own family home, which has perfectly good servants, some of whom have been taking care of you since you first soiled yourself as a baby, is a good distance beyond the pale. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ll send him home.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ said Erskine.

  ‘You’d rather not? Well, I’m afraid there isn’t a bed for him downstairs. If you don’t send him home, he’ll just have to sleep in your room.’

  Erskine gulped. A door from the library led out to the pond at the back of the house and part of him wanted to run outside
to join the ducklings. His father, of course, had not made the prior threat with the slightest expectation of it being carried out – it was just a way of making clear that Sinner wouldn’t be allowed to stay – but Erskine said, ‘All right.’

  ‘“All right”?’

  ‘I’d rather that than send him home. I find him indispensable.’

  Erskine’s father raised his eyebrows. Erskine knew he would be too stubborn to go back on his offer. ‘Very well, then. Tell your mother to tell Tara to make up a cot in your room. Let’s see how long you can maintain this charade. But I don’t want you complaining to your sister that I’ve punished you. This is your ridiculous choice.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your speech is ready for tomorrow, at least?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  Erskine went out, leaving his manuscript. He decided to go upstairs to see if Sinner had bothered to unpack his luggage. On the stairs he met Morton, who was looking well fed.

  ‘Hello, Erskine.’

  ‘Hello, Morton.’

  ‘Lovely house.’

  ‘Yes. How is your brother’s health?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Each of them felt they should make some comment about the engagement but neither wanted to endure a whole conversation on that subject so they just stood and looked at each other until finally Erskine lifted his empty valise and said, ‘I’d better take this upstairs.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What about that time you kicked a football into my head so that I fell over, came and helped me up, apologised at such length that I got embarrassed and laughed it off, waited for me to walk on, and then immediately did it again, in front of the whole of Trinity College First Eleven?’ Erskine wanted to add. ‘Will you still do that sort of thing when you are my brother-in-law?’ But he didn’t. Instead, he walked on up the stairs, thinking about what ‘threats’ anyone could possibly make to his father and Bruiseland. Violence? Even if that were likely, he couldn’t bring himself to feel any concern.

  Sinner was dozing in Erskine’s bedroom, although of course he had not bothered to unpack the luggage. When a fox wanders into the streets of London, Erskine had often wondered, does it notice a change, and does it care? Is there some deep quality of wrongness, as in a nightmare, to cement and glass, to straight lines and right-angles, or is the beast’s ontology as rugged and graceful as the beast itself? In the same way, he now asked himself, did Sinner feel out of place in Claramore, or would Sinner have sneered at the very possibility of feeling out of place, and the weakness it implied? He stroked the boy’s shoulder for a few seconds and then, when Sinner stirred, hurriedly turned the stroking motion into a vigorous shaking one.

  ‘My father says you’re to sleep in here with me.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘But there’s no reason for you to be up here during the day. You’d better go downstairs. Ask Tara about a cot.’ Then, as Sinner left, Erskine said, ‘By the way, if that arsehole Morton asks you to do anything, even so much as take a telegram, you aren’t to do it, all right?’ He’d never said ‘arsehole’ before in his life.

  ‘Who’s Morton?’

  ‘My sister’s fiancé. He’s an absolute bacillus. I can’t tell you how much I wish something terrible would happen to him.’

  Erskine already felt tired of humanity, so rather than going back downstairs he lay on his bed with a book until the telephone rang at half past seven. He picked up the receiver and heard the tinny sound of a gong being struck. It was time to change for dinner.

  On his way back down he came across two big-eared men arguing in German on the landing. Seeing Erskine, the older man broke off and said, ‘How do you do? You are Philip Erskine, I expect. I am Berthold Mowinckel and this is my second son Kasimir.’ As he shook Berthold Mowinckel’s hand, Erskine was thrilled to recall that Berthold Mowinckel had probably once shaken Hitler’s.

  A decorated lieutenant-colonel in the Austro-Hungarian army, Mowinckel had found himself in Munich soon after the Great War. After being introduced at a lecture to an ex-soldier and art student called Walter Nauhaus, he became a member of the Thule Society. At the third meeting he attended he stood up and announced that he had discovered in himself a rare mystical gift: ancestral-clairvoyant memory, which meant that he could remember the whole history of his tribe, passed down from first-born son to first-born son since the dawn of the human race, as clearly as if he had been present himself.

  His chronology began around 228,000 BC, when there were three suns in the sky and the earth was populated by giants, dwarves and aquatic centaurs. After a long period of strife his Mowinckel ancestors, the descendants of a union between the air gods and the water gods, helped to restore peace and soon founded grand colonies as far afield as Agartha in Tibet. Then around 12,500 BC a war began between the Irminist religion of Krist and the corrupt Wotanists. The war raged on and off until 777 AD, when, by some treachery, the arch-Wotanist Charlemagne managed to capture the Irminist temple at the Externsteine rocks near Detmold, so the Mowinckels had to flee to Russia. Berthold Mowinckel himself had for his entire life been persecuted by the Wotanists, the Catholics, the Jews and the Freemasons, who, collectively, were also to blame for Germany’s recent defeat and the collapse of the Hapsburg empire, injustices only slightly greater than the conspiracy’s sabotage of the hairbrush factory in which Mowinckel had invested most of his wife’s savings.

  Mowinckel became a hero to the Ariosophists and wrote several books of prophecy and poetry. In 1931 Richard Anders, a member of the Thule Society who had also joined Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, introduced Mowinckel to Heinrich Himmler. Himmler became fascinated with Mowinckel’s chronicles and later appointed him head of the Department of Ancient History within the SS’s Race and Settlement Main Office in Munich. That very week, however, tragedy struck. His two sons, Gustav and Kasimir, were walking down Sparkassenstrasse in Munich when Gustav pushed his younger brother out of the way of a chunk of falling masonry. Gustav himself was hit in the head and died in hospital three days later. And with the death of a first-born son, the flame of the Mowinckels’ ancestral-clairvoyant memory was snuffed out for ever. For several months afterwards Berthold gave Kasimir regular tests on Irminist history, but whatever he tried – berating him, slapping him, hypnotising him – his son couldn’t seem to remember a single detail. Then one day Kasimir told his father that his brother’s spirit had appeared to him in a dream and passed on the power, but the details he timidly offered were never quite consistent with his father’s recollections. ‘Why did your brother have to give his life for you?’ Berthold asked over and over again.

  Eventually, on the brink of wringing his son’s neck in frustration, he went to Himmler and persuaded him to fund an expedition to Tibet to find Agartha. On his return three months later he claimed to have drunk the blood of a talking panda that he’d shot, met a tribe of women who carried magical stones in their vaginas, and seen the ruins of a gigantic monastery the size of a city. Himmler was fascinated, but the two men fell out over a disputed cocktail recipe and Mowinckel was never again part of the Nazi inner circle. Now he travelled Europe giving lectures and selling books of his poetry.

  Erskine chatted with the two men for a few minutes, failing to find a polite juncture to ask for gossip about Hitler, and then went downstairs to find his sister, hayfeverish, blowing her nose in the hall. He accompanied her into the north dining room, where he was dismayed to see that only ten places had been laid out. He’d known the Berlin Olympics would disrupt the conference, but he’d never guessed that attendance would be quite so poor. Were these the only fascists in Europe who didn’t yet despise his father? Perhaps the rest were too embarrassed to admit that they hadn’t been invited to the games either and were sitting at home with the curtains closed and the radio on. That is probably what he would have done in the circumstances.

  Circling the room, he counted off the guests on his fingers. ‘You, me, Father, Mother, Bruiseland, Mowinckel and his s
on, the mad Italian—’

  ‘He may be mad but he does have some interesting ideas about music.’

  ‘—and your noble fiancé, which makes nine. Whom does that leave?’

  A placecard revealed the final visitor to Claramore to be Edgar Aslet, who was a Tory MP and the most boring human being Erskine had ever met – so boring that he had never been able to fix in his mind even a single detail about the man’s life or achievements. Erskine’s father sat at the head of the table, and he preferred to dine with men he already knew, so he had Aslet on his left and Bruiseland on his right. Erskine’s mother sat at the other end, and she liked to keep an eye on the foreign guests of honour, so she had Amadeo on her left and Berthold Mowinckel on her right. Between them, in the middle of the table, was a more youthful quartet: Erskine next to Morton, and, opposite, Kasimir Mowinckel next to Evelyn. As the wine was being poured, Erskine’s mother said, ‘Now, Mr Morton, is it true that as a Blackshirt you smoke nothing but special Blackshirt cigarettes?’

  ‘Morton’s not a proper Blackshirt,’ said her husband.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s right,’ said Morton. ‘I’ve been to a lot of the meetings and I know a lot of the top men. But I’ve decided not to join.’

  ‘Good thing too,’ said Bruiseland. ‘Those “top men” as you call them – I know one or two myself and before they were Blackshirts they were all rubber planting in Malaya, sheep farming in Patagonia, mining in Kenya. … Failed in England, went abroad, failed abroad, came back to England, cast around for something to do. And then they’re supplemented by a rabble of taxi-drivers and cabinet-makers flinging potatoes full of razor-blades.’

  ‘My reasons are more to do with their political ideas,’ said Morton. ‘The British Union of Fascists talk a great deal about revolution and dictatorship, which is one thing in Italy, as you know, Signor Amadeo, but quite another thing in England. The English like solidity, stability and banality. Most of the Blackshirts are too young to realise that. But if they carry on behaving with such crudeness and aggression they will set fascism back ten years.’ Erskine noticed that whenever Morton was not speaking Bruiseland seemed to stare very aggressively in his direction, but whenever Morton was speaking Bruiseland seemed to stare very aggressively at a spot on the wall behind Evelyn’s head.